Music

Inside Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s Next Album ‘Hypnotic Eye’

Related Tags:

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are readying a new record for this summer, according to Rolling Stone. The magazine reports that Hypnotic Eye will include eleven songs; some of the titles are, at press time, “American Dream Plan B,” “Faultlines,” “Red River,” “Burn Out Town” and “Shadow People,” and that the album has been in the works since 2011.

The article says that the album harkens back to the early Heartbreakers sound of their first two albums, 1976’s Tom Petty and the Heartbreakersand 1978’s You’re Gonna Get It. Petty says that his songwriting partner, Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, told him, “You sing like you did on the first two albums.” The article notes that Petty decided against using songs that were too close to “the blues bag” of their last effort, 2010’s Mojo.

But earlier this year, when Radio.com spoke with Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench, promoting his solo debut, You Should Be So Lucky, denied that the album is a reaction to the sound of Mojo: “I don’t really have a ‘take’ on how it sounds. I don’t really. It sounds like the Heartbreakers to me. I don’t think the Heartbreakers need to be pinned down. It’s a very versatile band. If you catch us when we’re just in a room messing around, or if you hear some of the songs that don’t make it to a record, they encompass a really broad spectrum. It’s a broad spectrum of things that [Petty] wrote, and that he and Mike have written for this record. How things are sequenced, and which songs are chosen will determine the nature of the record. I’m curious, too. It’s going to be a bit of a surprise to me, because I’m not producing the record.”